


"I should have been comforting you" : beyond parentification 101

by amonitrate



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Child Abuse, Child Neglect, Gen, Meta, Parentification
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-26
Updated: 2018-04-26
Packaged: 2019-04-28 00:35:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 15,690
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14437635
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amonitrate/pseuds/amonitrate
Summary: A collection of meta posts about parentification in SPN, focusing primarily on the relationships between John, Dean, and Sam Winchester.





	1. Introduction

**Author's Note:**

> Please note that no part of this writing or the original concepts developed here may be used outside of fanfiction or fandom meta context without my direct permission. That includes your school papers/academic projects. 
> 
> Use of any of these original ideas without permission and attribution outside of the fandom context they were intended for is plagiarism and intellectual theft. And if you’re referencing this work within fandom please don’t pass it off as your own, be a good fan and give me credit for my work by linking back to this post.

The following explorations of parentification in SPN were originally posted on tumblr around 2014-2016. Often stream of consciousness, they were attempts to develop my thinking and usually began as reactions to discussions in fandom at the time, the sometimes complex contexts of which would be difficult and time consuming to fully reconstruct. While many of these pieces are not as formal as the longer meta pieces I’ve written -- and at times are even fragmented -- I do think they have value and decided to collect them into a thematic series. While the original style has been preserved they have been lightly edited for typos and clarity and grouped here in an attempt at a coherent reading experience, and are therefore not chronological. Given that they were the product of my thoughts playing out over time, there will be some repetition.

Before we proceed to the meta, a brief introduction to parentification: Dr. Lisa M. Hooper of the University of Alabama describes parentification as follows: 

> **Parentification** is often defined as a type of role reversal, boundary distortion, and inverted hierarchy...in which children or adolescents assume developmentally inappropriate levels of responsibility in the family of origin that go unrecognized, unsupported, and unrewarded...[T]he overarching role of the parentified youth can be described as that of caregiver - caring for others at the expense of caring for self. It is often clinically observed and empirically examined along two dimensions: instrumental parentification and emotional parentification.
> 
>   * **Instrumental parentification** primarily involves completing physical tasks for the family such as taking care of relatives... grocery shopping, paying bills, or ensuring that a younger sibling attends and does well in school.
>   * **Emotional parentification** often involves a child or adolescent taking on the role and responsibilities of confidant, secret keeper, or emotional healer for family members.
> 


 The key here is that the responsibility placed on the child is _developmentally inappropriate_ , is a reversal of the roles of parent and child, and comes at the expense of that parentified child’s selfhood.

While I do think that a reader unfamiliar with parentification may pick up the gist through reading these pieces, they were written assuming basic knowledge of parentification as a concept, hence the “beyond parentification 101” in the title. 


	2. Excerpt from "This is What You're Gonna Become"

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The following excerpt from a longer meta, _[This is What You're Gonna Become: season 9 as the culmination of Dean Winchester’s thematic roles of identity in SPN](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11495241/chapters/25787637)_ makes a good entry point for this project. Many of these ideas can be seen scattered throughout the pieces that follow: some of those pieces led up to this excerpt and others continue and elaborate the concepts I was working out here.

On SPN, the reversal of roles between John and Dean inherent to both types of parentification boils down to freeing John from his parental responsibilities to both of his sons in order to pursue the revenge he sees as more important, while Dean simultaneously provides [instrumental support of Sam and] emotional support/comfort to John while being robbed of receiving either emotional support or parenting himself. Of the two types of parentification [the emotional aspect is recognized as the more damaging](http://www.parentification.ua.edu/uploads/1/8/9/9/18990327/hooper-parentification.-in-r.-levesque-ed.-encyclopedia-of-adolescence.pdf). This is especially true if the child receives no other forms of emotional support. A child like Dean with no other family connections, no established sense of community other than fellow hunters, not even the stability of consistent schooling to count on, is left with very little support of any kind.

The two-pronged parentification Dean experienced is not just about serving as surrogate parent to a sibling, but about serving as surrogate spouse/confidant to a parent. It’s about never being able to fill either of those roles adequately because they’re abusive and inappropriate, but also  being prevented from filling more appropriate roles of son/sibling. There’s an inconsistency and blurring of roles that deeply undermines the parentified child’s ability to form a sense of self and agency.

Why _doesn’t_ John see parenting as his job? How can he view parenting as a job he can delegate to his elementary school aged son?

In order for this shifting of roles to happen, the parent has to come to see the child as no longer a child at all, and not even as a fellow adult, because then they might have to be treated as an equal instead of a subordinate. This is the part that makes it difficult for the abused child to form their own sense of personhood, because they have been emotionally enmeshed with their parent. They are not recognized as a separate person by the parent, as a child with a child’s needs, but seen as an extension of the parent’s self. The selfhood of the child is necessarily erased.

In order to meet and even anticipate the demands placed on them the parentified child quickly comes to internalize the point of view of the parent. The parent on the other hand is heavily invested in avoiding seeing anything from the pov of the child, because that would require the parent to see how they are abusing their child, to confront their abusive actions and how they have impacted the child. The relationship becomes by design a one-way street. The child supports the parent. The parent leans on the child. Who supports the child?

By taking on the parent’s pov, understanding all the pressures the parent is under as Very Important, clearly more important than the needs of the child, the child comes to see their own needs as unimportant, often to the point where they can’t even recognize they have needs. It becomes essential to the child to avoid causing trouble by potentially worrying the parent, by adding to the parent’s burden that has caused the parent to abdicate their responsibilities in the first place.

The parent reinforces this by showing minimal interest in supporting the child emotionally, because the parent feels overwhelmed and/or has other priorities, because the child downplays their own needs in the face of picking up on the fact that the parent can’t handle the child’s needs. Because the parent’s needs are primary and eclipse the needs of the child. The child sees the relationship through the parent’s pov, and the parent doesn’t attempt to see through the child’s pov at all but only through their own. Neatly, that way no one acknowledges what is happening to the child.

Robbing the child of any sense of self by turning the child into a vehicle to ease the parent’s needs, the parent comes to functionally treat the child as an object of use rather than a child to be nurtured. And for Dean, when you throw in not just the instrumental and emotional parentification but his coercion as a child into becoming a soldier in his father’s war, therefore coming to see himself as not just keeping his family together practically and emotionally speaking but as a weapon and cannon fodder in the defense of his family’s literal survival, this objectification becomes three-fold. Dean becomes a tool to John, not his son. Dean sees himself as an object to be used instead of a full person because that’s how he’s been treated.

It’s also replicating the larger dynamic: it further isolates Dean from Sam by a kind of forced teaming with John, which makes Sam in turn feel isolated from his brother and father, who he perceives as a unit bound by secrets he wasn’t privy to. The results of John’s parentification of Dean, seen here [in season two] in an extreme form even for their family, drives a wedge between the brothers at a time when they need each other, just as it did during their childhood. Dean’s been unable to properly mourn John’s death because of this secret, the very secret that guaranteed he had no way to share his feelings with Sam even when Sam has encouraged him to do so.

One of the textbook results of parentification is anger and resentment towards the parentified child from siblings, and I think this scene [in 2.10, Hunted] illustrates the whole dynamic well. While I won’t get too far into Sam’s POV here due to the focus of this meta, typically the parentified child is seen by siblings as complicit with the parent. Because the parentified child, especially in cases that involve emotional parentification, have been made privy to the concerns of the parent in ways the other siblings have not, and as mentioned in the previous discussion tend to internalize the POV of the parent before they have a chance to develop their own perspectives, the siblings often see the parentified child as allying with the parent in a way that doesn’t accurately reflect the parentified child’s actual experience. What the siblings (and often the parentified child) aren’t aware of is that the parentified child was never given a choice over this dynamic. The dynamic ruptures the possibility for true alliance between the siblings with one another against the parent. The parentified child is as isolated as the non-parentified siblings, but in a different way. Often anger that should be targeted at the parent is instead directed at the parentified child as the parent-surrogate, because the parent isn’t available and the parentified child serves as the “face” of an authority they don’t actually possess, for dynamics they don’t fully understand or have any control over.

I think we see examples of how John’s parentification of Dean impacted Sam and Dean’s relationship through the series, but this scene [in Hunted] in particular drives home the no-win situation for the parentified child. Dean’s left with the choice between betraying his father by breaking his promise or betraying his brother by keeping it. And at this point in the series, Dean has just begun questioning his upbringing and has yet to question his Save Sammy role and how it functions. So here we’re confronted by the wider effects of parentification on Sam and Dean, reverberating even after John’s death.


	3. Against Mom!Dean

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The following pieces react to the trend in fandom of calling Dean “Sam’s mom,” a substitute for Mary, or discussing Dean as Sam’s parent. This ignores the dominant role John Winchester played in both characters’ lives as their parent and simultaneously obscures or erases John’s abuse of Dean via parentification.

I wish we would get away from labeling [this] as Dean being a “mom” to Sam. It’s a weird way of gendering parenting with an unspoken undercurrent that it’s natural for the “dad” to neglect his children. It buys into the traditional sexist roles that parents are slotted into — the dad’s role is to be away from home working (John: hunting) and to be tough and discipline the children, any love is a tough love kind of thing. The mom role is to nurture and take care of things like feeding and caring emotionally for the child.

I know what people are trying to express by talking about mom!dean but I think it tends to unconsciously repeat some of the subtext when it comes to ways that fandom can let John off the hook for his neglect of Sam and Dean in ways I don’t think they would if Mary had lived instead and behaved the same way.

I also think it tends to obscure some of the nuances of parentification, where the child put into this position is nowhere near a parent. They’re always still a sibling, one with the responsibilities of a parent but not the maturity, knowledge, or authority of one. I’d rather we called it what it is.

To sum up, Dean wasn’t Sam’s mom. I know it’s a convenient shorthand, but it just has a lot of layers that make me uncomfortable.

* * *

 

The point is yes, Dean tried to protect Sam and tried to raise him the best he could _because he didn’t have a choice_ but Dean was not a parent to Sam. Equating Dean with a parent at all is highly problematic given the parentification going on, equating Dean with a mother because he took care of Sam’s basic needs is also messed up.

Mom’s might come in all styles but Dean was not a mom. Sorry. Dean was a little boy who had the responsibilities of a parent dumped on him before he was nine years old. I wish fandom would stop equating this with being a parent and stop equating the basic minimum of caretaking as being a mother.

can we just sit in the gap where we don’t have a word for Dean’s role? he was not fully brother. he was not anything near parent. if you really want to begin understand what happened, you need to let go of what you think you know about these things. 

* * *

when i say i’m searching for a vocabulary because what i’m talking about slips through the cracks of current terminology/understanding, i mean that deliberately. i mean there are no words, no labels, no stereotypical roles, that fit when what we’re talking about is parentification, and slapping a word like “mother” onto the situation is to obscure reality in favor of a label everyone is more familiar with.

#parentification #this is a hybrid #a chimera #and calling it mother #calling it mary replacement #is too easy #and reducing a very complicated system #into something you think you understand

* * *

[ **bangingpatchouli** ](http://bangingpatchouli.tumblr.com/) **asked: I've just been reading through some of the shame/blame posts regarding victims submitting instead of escaping, and it makes me think of how many fans view Dean as consciously and willingly embracing John's world view when pretty clearly that wasn't the case.**

yeah, for sure. i mean Dean did embrace John’s worldview but it wasn’t a simple or conscious willing process.

actually, i’m gonna strike that. Dean didn’t “embrace” anything. he was conditioned into it. later on it looks like embracing and in some ways is but it’s complicated by the fact that he never had a choice and is [ very conscious ](http://amonitrate.tumblr.com/post/85171677604/this-is-what-youre-gonna-become-4) of the fact that he feels he’s not capable of anything else.

it’s similar to Stockholm Syndrome; only imagine instead of adults held hostage after they’ve formed their personalities, it’s children from birth/very young. And it’s not for a relatively short period of time (comparatively) — it’s years. An entire childhood of years. There’s a reason Judith Herman compares abusive families to prisons in _Trauma and Abuse_.

Dean was forced into a position of abusive responsibility for himself and Sam early on via John’s parentification and neglect; it was a matter of survival for him to conform/submit — and he appears to have seen it not just in terms of his own survival but Sam’s as well. Add to that the hunter’s world and knowing that there are actual threats to their lives … I wrote about this aspect of it in [ this meta post ](http://amonitrate.tumblr.com/post/84968640674/this-is-what-youre-gonna-become-2) and others in the series. John directly asserts that Sam’s _life_ , not just his well-being, is Dean’s responsibility in _Something Wicked_ , and he does it again as adults in _In My Time of Dying._ How do you rebel against that without feeling like you’re putting your brother’s life at risk? Conforming and obeying becomes a literal life or death situation. The tiny bit Dean rebelled by leaving Sam alone in the motel room to play video games, in his mind, led to Sam nearly dying.

* * *

long story short: when Demon!Dean [in season 10] says Sam didn’t have a brother, that doesn’t mean fill in the blank with Dean was Sam’s parent. Instead there’s … well, kind of a blank or fuzzy space or wordless condition.

If John had been absent totally or completely checked out as an authority figure in their lives even while present physically, I think you could more accurately call Sam and Dean’s relationship child/parent – but John very much wasn’t checked out. He was neglectful and emotionally abusive but part of that emotional abuse was his use of his parental authority.

The way he wielded that to brainwash his sons, as Dean puts it. The way he used it as a bludgeon on Dean in several instances in season 1, in front of Sam. The way he used it in the “Something Wicked” flashbacks, again, apparently at least partially in front of Sam. The inferences we can make from what happened in Flagstaff [from 5.18]. All of this is going to add up to Dean not actually having the authority of parent in Sam’s eyes.

I think it’s notable that while we repeatedly see scenes of John telling Dean to “look after Sammy” we don’t have one scene that I can remember of John telling Sam to “listen to your brother” or the like. There’s not a corresponding command that Sam obey Dean coming from John – if I’ve forgotten one please remind me.

anyway i’m just working this stuff out aloud at this point.

some of the discussion about parentification and the roles of children in a situation like that is something i find it hard to fully parse out. i’ve been mulling it over a lot in my head over the years. all of the literature I’ve seen focuses on the parent/parentified child relationship, not so much on the relationship between the siblings in such a family beyond some general stuff about resentment.

i think when discussing this stuff it’s really important not to discount John as a presence that affects Sam and Dean’s relationship. John was definitely absent alot; but he was not totally absent. I think fandom tends to exaggerate things one way or the other: either John wasn’t neglectful and Dean wasn’t parentified, or John was totally absent and Sam and Dean might as well have been orphans.

I think there are situations where the latter is more true than in the Winchester dynamic, where John was still a heavy influence in his children’s lives. There are dynamics where the parent cedes most or all authority, but John isn’t one of those parents.

The reality is in order for Dean to be parentified, John has to be a presence because parentification involves a role reversal. He was a heavy influence, he was definitely present and definitely _the_ authority figure in both Sam and Dean’s lives growing up, even when he was absent. Part of the thing about the dynamics between siblings when this parentification is present (in my understanding, but I think this lines up with what we see of the Winchesters) is that the child left “in charge” never has full authority of any kind. Usually the parent undermines it in many ways. We see this when John chastises Dean in front of Sam repeatedly. The parentified child is still just a child, and doesn’t have the capacity to parent. Usually the other sibling(s) recognize these things on some level, and it plays into how the siblings interact.

which is why I find Sam bringing up John [to Demon!Dean] so so so very interesting.

anyway like i said i haven’t fully parsed all this out for myself; but it’s a nuance that tends to get lost in these discussions: that Sam is still _John’s child_ , not Dean’s. Sam is still going to see John as his parent, not Dean. It makes it harder to talk about some of this stuff, because i get what people are trying to dig into when they talk about Sam seeing Dean as his parent or Dean seeing Sam as his child.

There isn’t easy terminology for the reality.


	4. On John Winchester

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The next set of pieces explores John Winchester and his abusive parenting in more depth, focusing on his parentification of Dean.

i think the thing about john apologism is that it so perfectly parallels abuse apologism irl, including the ways abusive parents themselves (consciously or unconsciously) gaslight their kids into thinking _they did the best they could._

and that _doing the best they could_ translates into _no abuse happened_.

especially in situations like John’s where he’s relying on Dean for emotional support. it becomes this self-reinforcing cycle for both parent and child. relying on the kid for emotional support is both inherently abusive because kids aren’t capable of dealing with it but also it provides a built in gaslighting component of justifying the parent’s context to the kid they’re abusing. the kid is left erasing and perpetuating their own abuse because they _understand_ (because they’ve been told over and over) how hard the parent has it, how much the parent needs it, because the parent is _doing the best they can_.

I’m not sure if I’m explaining this bit right, but it makes recognizing the emotional abuse super hard. because the kid has to fight through layers of recognizing _the parent’s context_ and putting it ahead of their own, if they can even recognize their own context independent of the parent’s. Because there’s always the refrain of how hard things are for the parent that covers over everything, enforcing a sense of guilt and feeling like they’re betraying the parent if the kid dares get angry at how they were treated.  

How can I be angry at them. _They just had it so hard. They were trying to protect me. They did their best._

this is not to say that abusive parents don’t have very real contexts, tough lives and stressors.

or that kids are wrong to love their abusive parents.

i just wish fandom would complicate its understanding of these issues.

it’s not either/or.

it’s both/and.

parents who behave like john are abusive. _the fucking contexts don’t matter._ intentions don’t matter. whether or not they feel love towards their children doesn’t matter. whether or not they also are supportive and “good” parents in other ways doesn’t matter.

none of those things erase the abusive acts, the _behavior_.

abused children very often love their parents. often they gaslight themselves in order to protect themselves and the parent and to maintain the illusion of security because they have no other choice and often know nothing different.

Another component of how john apologism tends to reflect irl abuse apologism is how it relies on either erasing or minimizing abuse, whether that’s emotional, physical, or neglect.

_it didn’t happen…_

_maybe it happened BUT it wasn’t that bad…_

_maybe it happened BUT [the abused person] isn’t that bothered by that kind of thing…_

now I suspect that sometimes there is a component where people who have internalized their own abuse might make some of these arguments. i try to stay aware of that, and i don’t think i do a great job of keeping it in mind when i get angry.

but i also very much doubt most john winchester stans fall into this category.

pretty sure there’s a whole bunch more to be said but i’ll leave it at that for now.

* * *

 

i added this to the post about john apologism mirroring irl abuse apologism but i wanted to pull it out because it’s something i just now was able to articulate for myself, though i think it’s why i react so strongly to “they did the best they could” in conversations about parental abuse:

it’s because

_they did the best they could_

translates into (or is equated with)

 _no abuse happened_.

the built-in function is to minimize the abuse and to return the focus of attention back to the parent and the parent’s needs rather than keep it on the child and the child’s needs.

which in the case of parentification (and arguably in most types of abuse) was the exact problem in the first place: putting the needs of the parent above the needs of the child.

which is not to say parents don’t have needs that deserve to be met.

it’s to say that those needs should never be met _at the expense of_ or _through_ the child _._

and I think i’ve discussed before how the hard thing is, in many cases the statement “they did the best they could” is accurate. in the sense that this was all the particular parent was capable of regardless of their intention.

the issue is the motivation for bringing it up within discussions of the abuse of a child. if we’re talking about character meta for the parent, it’s a valid issue to pull apart – whether or not the parent was aware of how they were abusing their child, how that plays into “doing their best.”

but when you’re discussing specifically how a parent abused a child

take a look at why you feel it needs to be said. why it’s relevant.

and maybe think about how inappropriate it is.

it just occurred to me that within the context of parentification especially (but again my bet is this is true of many kinds of child abuse) the child does more to understand the parent’s pov than the parent ever does to try to put themselves in the child’s pov.

the child understands the pressures on the parent, what the parent is worried about, at least the fact of the worry/anxiety if not the full meaning etc. _because the parent tells them_.

that’s the bit about emotionally relying on the child – the child can’t help but understand (from a limited, child’s perspective of course, but you’d be surprised how much kids pick up) the parent’s side of things. that’s the bit about _they did the best they could_ that’s insidious to the child, because the child sees their own abuse from the perspective of the parent – a perspective that necessarily erases the abuse.

the parent on the other hand is heavily invested in avoiding seeing anything from the pov of the child. because that would require the parent to see how they are abusing their child, to confront their abusive actions.

this is also a big part of parentification: it’s not just that the parent emotionally relies on the child for support (among other issues) it’s that the parent _does not reciprocate_ and emotionally support the child.

the relationship becomes a one-way street. the child supports the parent. the parent leans on the child.

who supports the child?

well.

this is what i mean by intentionally or unintentionally gaslighting a child about their own abuse. by taking on the parent’s pov, understanding all the pressures the parent is under (or just understanding that there is pressure if not the specifics), the child sees their own emotional needs as less important. if not nonexistent.

don’t want to worry them. don’t want to add to that burden.

and then the parent reinforces that by showing minimal interest in supporting the child emotionally. because the parent feels overwhelmed. because the child downplays their own needs in the face of picking up on the fact that the parent can’t handle the child’s needs.

there are a million ways parents can communicate to a child that they can’t handle a child’s needs.

it’s insidious, is what I’m saying.

but my larger point is that the child sees the relationship mostly if not only through the parent’s pov, and the parent doesn’t attempt to see through the child’s pov at all but only through their own.

neatly, that way no one acknowledges what’s going on.

* * *

put it this way: i say things like john abdicated his role as parent, but that’s not really accurate.

John stuck around and sometimes acted as parent, sometimes as drill sergeant, sometimes as needy spouse/child for Dean to comfort, etc.

John doesn’t totally absent himself as parent any more than Dean is totally embodying the role of parent – and that’s where a lot of the fucked up stuff around agency comes to play. It’s super hard for a child to develop a sense of self and agency if they’re told on one hand they are to act as parent (take care of Sammy) but on the other undermined in that role and berated at least emotionally if they perform this role “wrong” – as with the Striga, as with when Sam ran away.

I’m having a hard time articulating this aspect, but there’s an inconsistency there that deeply undermines a child’s ability to form a sense of self and agency. There’s no way for them to develop a healthy capacity for responsibility if they’re a) given too much responsibility at too young an age b) given very little guidance and support for that responsibility c) not given much emotional support/parenting of their own separate from that responsibility and d) undermined/punished when they “do it wrong.” Because it’s inevitable because of a-c that they’re going to “do it wrong.”

It’s impossible for a child to “do” parenting right.

I think it’s easier for people to grasp the aspect of emotional parentification that is a kid providing emotional comfort and support to a parent in age-inappropriate ways (comfort the parent should be getting from peers) but I suspect the harder thing to recognize, because it is an absence/negative, is that the parent is not providing age-appropriate comfort and support to the child. Which is emotional neglect.

Both of these things are vital to the dynamic existing, but the latter is probably the most important aspect of the parentification when it comes to the damage it does. Because if the parent was giving the child the appropriate emotional support, the kid would most likely not feel like they had to give age-inappropriate support to the parent on the regular. And even if they were, it would be more mutual (the neglect would be absent, but the enmeshment would probably still be present). Possibly I’m wrong that this is less damaging, maybe it’s just differently damaging.

#parentification #one of the problems with talking about this #is how often the damage done is minimized #or even spun to be a positive #often because the child seems mature or competent #and deficits are very carefully hidden #and that is PART OF THE DAMAGE #and PART OF THE DYNAMIC

* * *

[RE: Something Wicked]

_Yeah, basically, John set Dean up for failure and then judged him when he did fail._

I’m struck by the idea of ‘failure’ here. Did dean fail? What did he fail at?

Really what’s going on is John projecting his own failure into Dean. Dean can’t fail at being a parent, not really, because *deans not a parent*

Can you fail at your own abuse?

I think this distinction is important and I wasn’t really making it myself at first in my own mind. again it’s about perception: John treating Dean as if he failed at something that is actually John’s failure; Dean’s internalizing this perception that he failed rather than seeing that it’s John’s failure to parent both him and Sam. I’ve talked about Sam as the family scapegoat, but in a lot of ways John also scapegoated Dean for John’s failures as a parent via this treating Dean as if he’d failed this impossible task that was never Dean’s to begin with.


	5. Born Caretaker?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The next set of posts addresses an idea popular in fandom that Dean either chose or volunteered for his role in the family or that being a caretaker is an “innate” part of his personality and so his “parental” relationship with Sam is a natural result rather than a product of parentification. 
> 
> This characterization overwrites the origins of parentification in the relationship between parent and child and erases the inherent abusiveness, removing the parent as deliberate actor in the scenario under the guise of admiring qualities seen as positive or even heroic in the child. The parent’s agency is erased in favor of insisting on an agency in the child that he did not have in the situation.

remember how we were talking about how fandom analysis tends to attribute agency to Dean that he doesn’t/didn’t have?

that the relationships were being evaluated from a lens of parent/child, where Dean is the parent and therefore has the agency/power of a parent?

yeah.

There’s a reason that one of the chapters in Judith Herman’s book on cPTSD is called “Captivity” and that it compares growing up as a child in an abusive household with prisoners. They are not the same situations, but the lack of agency is inherent to the abuse. 

You can not agree that parentification/emotional incest is abuse and then claim that the child being abused has agency and choice over their abuse. This is extremely ignorant and damaging. Just like sexual incest is an adult twisting their relationship with a child and using it for their own needs by completely disregarding to the point of annihilation the needs of a child, emotional incest/parentification is an adult twisting their relationship with a child and using it for their own needs by completely disregarding to the point of annihilation the needs of a child.

This is not hyperbole. This is how this kind of abuse works. It inherently is about eliminating the ability of a child to have or develop a sense of agency. It is inherently about not giving a child choice.

This shows a deep lack of understanding of how abuse dynamics work when it comes to children and how they develop, and how children are dependent on adults and  _ do not have agency _ in that relationship when children.

There’s a reason we have an age of consent, for example.

It’s treating “codependency” the same whether we’re talking about adults in a codependent relationship or children being abused by their parents. It’s attributing adult agency to a child being forced by a parent to serve a parent’s needs. 

This is why I make the distinction between Dean (and Sam) having choice over their behavior as adults, but NOT having had a choice over the abuse that formed them (and their behavior) as children. Because abused children do not have choice over this stuff, but adults do.

This is the heart of one of the issues I was getting at re: fandom analysis. This kind of analysis treats Dean as if he was a mini-adult during the period of his childhood. This is exactly what I was talking about wrt skewed analysis that is damaging.

At least we’ve moved on from the “but Dean’s an inherent caretaker personality!” argument I used to run into on LJ.

* * *

 

idk about a hierarchy of who had it worst [between Sam and Dean]. i think that kind of evaluation isn’t particularly useful.

John’s parentification of Dean is a central part of the whole family dynamic and did not just impact Dean but also directly impacts Sam. I don’t think we have to say Dean had it “worst” to recognize the centrality of the act of parentification to the family dysfunction and to how it’s impacting both Sam and Dean now. I think it affected Sam and Dean in different ways, and manifests in different fucked up behaviors. Sam had some advantages to being the more protected child in that he was able to develop a greater sense of independence and selfhood, and he was able to briefly break away from the family. but I don’t think we have to set up a hierarchy of suffering to acknowledge that either?

as i keep saying, this shit is complicated. 

I’d also comment, and this is picky but it’s also key to how this stuff is discussed/understood: Dean didn’t “assume” the caretaker spot. Dean was [actively] forced into this role by John. This was not something Dean chose.

Dean has a choice now.

Dean did not have a choice at the time the role of caretaker was assigned to him.

Saying Dean “assumed” a role is to say that Dean chose that role.

Saying Dean “does and did have a choice” is to twist what happened.

He does have a choice now.

HE DID NOT HAVE A CHOICE AS A CHILD.

Seriously, he did not. You’re saying an abuse victim had a choice about being abused. You need to rethink that.

Dean was left alone as a child with his younger child sibling. Both of their survivals depended on him. This is not choice. Being forced into a role by your father is not a choice.

Parentification is child abuse, and you saying that Dean had a choice over that as a child is victim blaming. 

I think we need to be careful about how we talk about these things. You can talk about how that role is something Dean is NOW choosing to continue in. The implications of saying Dean “assumed” a role is that at the beginning, when that role was “assumed,” that it was a choice.

It wasn’t. Dean did not have agency when that role was forced onto him.

Let’s go with the analogy to incest that is inherent in “covert/emotional incest” for example. The reason this is given this term is the similarities to the inappropriate blurring of boundaries inherent in sexual incest. By your definition, you are saying that children forced into incestuous relationships had choices as children about it that they didn’t see.

Fuck that.

Rethink this.

The point about codependent relationships rooted in childhood abuse is that THERE WAS NO AGENCY at the time of childhood, but THERE IS AGENCY as adults.

Go read Judith Herman on cPTSD and tell me there was choice involved for an abused child. 

You are treating Dean as if he was an [equal] adult in a relationship with his father.

He was not. Children do  _ not _ have choices about how they are abused. They DO have choices about how they behave as adults even when that behavior is formed by childhood abuse.

This is a very important distinction.

* * *

 

# [ dean had no autonomy in the choices he made ](http://veneredirimmel.tumblr.com/tagged/dean-had-no-autonomy-in-the-choices-he-made) # [ because he knew that john would always judge his choices ](http://veneredirimmel.tumblr.com/tagged/because-he-knew-that-john-would-always-judge-his-choices) # [ dean had neither power neither authority (veneredirimmel) ](http://veneredirimmel.tumblr.com/tagged/dean-had-neither-power-neither-authority)

YES. THIS. The anxiety caused by the inconsistency is HUGE and a neglected point in the discussion. THANK YOU. Great point.

anyone who is told they have a responsibility, not given much in the way of instruction or support, then chastised for “doing it wrong” is going to develop anxiety. add in the fact that Dean’s a young child while this is going on? and add in life-or-death situations like the Striga?

look at the result of that: John takes Sam and Dean to Pastor Jim’s afterwards (right?). Which should have been what he did in the first place (leave his children with another responsible adult) but in these circumstances, given how he’s parentified Dean, this is going to come across to Dean like both punishment and implicit chastisement for wrongdoing and a lack of trust in Dean’s ability to “do his job." 

Which is SO FUCKED UP. John finally does (for once) what was right – and Dean is going to see it as reinforcing everything Dean did wrong. As a vote of no confidence. Because that’s explicitly/directly what John communicated to him about the situation.

and just a note, but talking about Dean as Sam’s parent also leaves out the reversal of  _ emotional _ roles between John and Dean, where Dean is emotional support/comfort for John and does not receive the same from him. Those are the two main aspects of parentification, and in some ways, this one is the most fucked up, more than the caretaking of another child. This is the part that makes it difficult for a child to form their own sense of personhood, because they are emotionally enmeshed with their parent. they are not recognized as a separate person by the parent, but seen as an extension of the parent’s self.

it’s not just about serving as surrogate parent to a sibling, but as serving as surrogate spouse to a parent. but not being able to fill either of those roles because they’re abusive and inappropriate, but not being allowed to develop into appropriate roles as son/sibling either.

it’s how you get kids that seem emotionally mature for their age as children grow into adults who are emotionally IMMATURE for their age.

* * *

 

**origins of parentification**

a brief word on  [ this gifset ](http://amonitrate.tumblr.com/post/76179982801/saltysamgirl-dean-comforting-his-parents) [which compares John in 2.01 with Dean comforting Mary as a child as seen in 5.16]:

just need to point out that the left hand side (John) is textbook parentification.

the right hand side, imo, is how that kind of thing develops.

we have 4 year old Dean (in the original of the memory) listening to his mother fight with his father on the phone. he knows his parents had been fighting for days before witnessing this phone call, his father is gone, and his mother isn’t hiding her distress about it.

It’s not that he’s witnessing her distress that’s the issue – it’s that  _ he’s distressed by it _ , and in his distress moves to comfort his mother. And his mother accepts this comfort without apparent awareness that  _ he’s comforting her because he needs comfort  _ – there’s not awareness in what we see here that her phone call with John (or the events leading up to it) has distressed Dean, that his offer of comfort is a response driven by his distress. He’s actually looking for comfort himself here because he needs his mother’s distress to stop in order to end his own distress. I’m not saying he doesn’t care about her apart from that, because kids can be naturally empathetic this way, but he doesn’t understand what’s happening beyond his mother being very upset in front of him, and his father gone. He’s only four years old.

Mary reinforces his comforting of her by calling him her little angel, then distracts him with pie – which might have been her attempt at comforting him. But what a child needs in that moment is for the source of the distress to be openly acknowledged, and for their own distress to be openly acknowledged. None of that happens here. What happens is that Dean gets positive reinforcement that it’s good to comfort his mother when she’s upset but that his own distress will go unacknowledged.

Now this is just one data point, so it’s not evidence that Mary would have parentified Dean the way John did in canon; but what this gifset is actually pointing out is how the reversal of emotional roles in parentification works.

A kid sees their parent distressed and offers comfort. Not because they are inherent caretakers, but because they are distressed at their parent’s distress. And when  _ the child’s distress _ is not noticed, acknowledged, and comforted, and instead the parent uses that child  _ as comfort  _ [for themselves], that’s the root of the abuse. Because the child’s emotional needs are being ignored in favor of the parent’s emotional needs, and the child is being exploited for the parent’s needs. 

When you’re talking about these two scenes together and you refer to them as evidence of Dean’s inherent caretaker personality, what you’re doing is erasing the fact that Dean was the one who needed comfort in both those instances, and that his parents needed to be seeking comfort from other adults and providing  _ him _ with comfort to his distress. 

imo, people calling this innate are not putting themselves or their empathy with the young child Dean, but instead with the adults he’s comforting.

this is hard stuff to recognize as dysfunctional or abusive, because  _ comforting people _ is something that is normally valued as a positive quality. And it is!

but not when it’s being done for a parent instead of/at the expense of a child’s own emotional well being.

Which is why John says “I should have been comforting you.” John lays it out right there for us.  _ He’s the one who should have been doing the emotional caretaking.  _

It’s significant that this line of John’s is left off that gifset.

* * *

 

People seem to take literally the whole “I made you grow up too fast” as if Dean literally grew up into an adult around age nine (if not four). And that’s how a lot of issues are treated subtextually, if not outright textually, in many many discussions. 

It can be subtle. I’m thinking of discussions I’ve had in the past re: the scene in 5.16 where Dean comforts Mary, and I’ve seen it framed as this sweet example of Dean’s innate caretaker tendencies. Completely ignoring the actual context of that scene as it would be to a 4 year old, which is that it’s very stressful for a child that young to see their mother in distress, to have their father mysteriously absent, for routines to be disrupted, and the “comforting” behavior he’s exhibiting is actually a desire to _be_ _reassured and comforted himself_ because he’s upset. 

And the framing of the scene is an example of this aspect we’re discussing, even – when Sam says he hadn’t realized how long Dean had been cleaning up John’s messes. Because right there is an adult role being projected onto past!child!Dean – because from the four year old child’s perspective, that’s not what is happening  _ at all _ , and this is the root of emotional parentification. It’s a hard thing for people to understand about that scene, but it’s there. 

And the scene is viewed as Sam getting a new understanding of his brother, but … again, not really. He gets more perspective on the overall family dynamic than he had before, but he’s getting the adult bird’s eye perspective, not the child’s. 

A child can’t clean up an adult’s messes. That role is projected onto the child, that might be the end result of the situation in some ways – but that’s really not what’s going on from the perspective of the child and how it affects the child. The child doesn’t experience it as “cleaning up a parent’s mess” the child experiences it as distress that needs to be resolved the only way they know how. Mommy is upset, this upsets the child, give mommy a hug so she stops being upset. 

The pattern is already there – Dean comforting a parent in a moment of stress, and not receiving direct support and reassurance, which is what the child actually needed there, the comfort he was giving was a direct sign of what he himself needed. “It’s okay, Mom. Dad still loves you. I love you, too. I’ll never leave you.” This directly echoes what Dean needs to hear as that four year old child. 

The heart of the issue for the child is never acknowledged directly – his fear and distress are never acknowledged. I mean literally this is John’s quote in action, “You shouldn’t have had to say that to me, I should have been saying that to you.” And because Mary was upset about what was going on with John, she doesn’t appear to wholly be attuned to what Dean needs. She accepts/receives his comfort without making the leap to understand that what he needs  _ from her  _ is the situation to be acknowledged and  _ his _ distress recognized. And maybe with Mary this was a one-off because of the situation (and that would be “good enough” parenting if so); but maybe not. We can’t tell from what we’re shown, but what we are shown is how this dynamic works in action.

Mary gives him indirect comfort in the form of flattery (you’re my little angel) and pie, but both of these things  _ reinforce _ the behavior pattern that we later see with John. I think I’ve discussed this before probably so now I’m just rambling, but it’s subtle stuff how this all works.

ANYWAY that’s the danger of thinking through your meta/ideas in a series of posts, which is how I tend to roll. You realize you’re using ideas/terminology/concepts common in fandom in a way you don’t actually support (and really hate), because they’re just so prevalent and it’s the language people use and its worked its way into your vocabulary, and if you’re not real careful and constantly deconstructing how you’re saying things, you fall into these traps. 

And then you come up short and think, wait, I don’t actually think Dean sees Sam as his baby, I don’t actually think Dean raised Sam, I don’t think Sam sees Dean as his parent exactly, it’s not either/or: “there was no parentification and neglect” versus “Dean completely raised Sam and John was 100% absent as influence/parent in their lives.” Because the truth is messier and in between those two poles. 

John was neglectful and canonically left them alone for extended periods in which Dean at a very young age was responsible for Sam’s survival etc, but John had a  _ huge _ impact on them, that can’t happen if Dean’s the one “raising” Sam. 

Parentification is that in between state.

But what this stuff does is contribute to popular subtext or outright text in meta like the idea that any of Sam’s dysfunctional behavior is due to only Dean’s influence, for example, when it’s clearly behavior/beliefs that John ingrained in  _ both _ sons. 

But a lot of times in fandom the flow of influence is seen as John->Dean->Sam in this completely artificial way as if John only interacted with Dean, who then only interacted with Sam. And that’s just one aspect I’ve observed due to the “Dean raised Sam” thing.

* * *

 

> The burden of Dean’s personality is placed on him by his father, and by his brother, that’s true. They expect him to be a certain way.  **I would also suggest that it is something innate in Dean.** The eldest son thing. It existed before his world fell apart, it was born in him. We saw how 4-year-old Dean comforted his mother when she was upset in “Heaven’s Door”. He knew what to do, Mom was crying, she needed a hug.  **Dean was born this way, he wasn’t made this way.** But it is reinforced by Dad and Sam. And even if Sam rebels against it, he still confides in Dean in a “what are we going to do about this??” way. As long as Dean isn’t worried, you feel safe. So Sam and Dad do that to Dean, they always have, and  **Dean doesn’t just “play along”. It is his life, his personality** .
> 
> ( [ x ](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sheilaomalley.com%2F%3Fp%3D81262&t=MjUyNmExNGQ2ZjU2NTg5N2U2MmRjNjc4OWZmZGQyMWUwNDRkNTJjNCw2TVNiNlhGRw%3D%3D&b=t%3AjYFgja_o5_j4LSQgd5Jfjg&p=http%3A%2F%2Famonitrate.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F91093903109%2Fthe-burden-of-deans-personality-is-placed-on-him&m=1) )

god knows i’ve railed against this to the point of ridiculousness, but i’m always interested in/suspicious of this insistence that this particular quality of Dean’s is “innate.”

Especially when that scene with Mary is used as evidence. As if parentification doesn’t start that early, and it’s clear that even before the fire there was some level of family dysfunction going on if John has left the family and he and Mary are arguing. 

people are very, very invested in the idea that this is “innate.” even as i’m enjoying them to bits and learning a lot i’ve also been noticing certain common fandom patterns/trends/themes showing up in these recaps [written by Sheila O’Malley] and i guess i shouldn’t be surprised to see this one show up, but i am a little.

* * *

 

kids don’t just assign themselves jobs, and also whenever there’s a repeated wording like that, it’s almost like conditioning. 

IDK, I know it’s a hard distinction to make between parent and what position Dean occupies, but it’s important to recognize, because insisting that Dean is Sam’s parent flat out erases and replicates the dynamics of the specific form of child abuse that impacted Dean,  _ and _ erases John Winchester’s abdication of his role of parent,  _ and _ erases the fact that Sam is not Dean’s child. It carries the subtext of agency and power dynamics that do not actually exist.

_ There is not a direct parallel _ between Linda Tran and Dean because Dean was a pre-pubescent child when he was given the responsibility for a child’s caretaking. 

_ That is not being a parent. These two things are not the same. _

Linda Tran’s role of parent to Kevin was not  _ abuse.  _

**Just because Dean might be meant to hear himself echoed in Linda’s words, that doesn’t mean we are supposed to take it as truth.**

Pulling that out for emphasis. I haven’t seen the ep yet (I know, I know) but this is super important and needs to be put in neon letters.

Dean is not a reliable narrator. He is going to, by virtue of how he was abused and neglected and the fact that he’s never processed it fully, see himself as occupying a parental role. In fact recognizing that parallel might be a positive step for him in beginning to understand what happened to him – but that’s not the full story and 

THAT DOESN’T MEAN FANDOM HAS TO SEE IT THAT WAY.

I can’t emphasize this enough. How Dean sees himself, how Dean sees Sam, how Sam sees Dean, how Dean or Sam saw John, how John saw Dean or Sam, these are not reliable and unbiased things. Fandom has the benefit of being able to step outside of that dysfunctional web and see it for what it is.

i don’t think all people who become parents (whether biologically or not) have choice.

there are children who become parents and this is not parentification.

there are people who become pregnant accidentally or against their will and have little or no recourse but to become a parent. i can’t comfortably call that choice.

it’s tricky to talk about, because it’s true that dean doesn’t have a choice and that can be a distinction between dean and parents who intentionally and by choice become parents, but i’m uncomfortable defining the difference between parentification and parenthood as one of choice for a number of reasons. In an ideal world, yeah. 

eta: the specific circumstances of parentification is the role reversal between a parent and a child, and so it’s about more than choice.

I just think we can talk about Dean’s lack of agency without assuming that Linda had choice over becoming a parent. We can talk about the huge differences in age and the impact of that. I just am very wary of making those assumptions about choice.

I think we can’t leave out the role reversal, because that’s what lies at the heart — the role reversal is key to the parentified child not receiving the kind of emotional support and yes  _ parenting _ that children need. The lack of agency/choice is very important, but it’s really easy to leave out John in all of this when we talk about it? That’s what happens in those parallels between Linda and Dean — John and his role is erased. John is still present as parent as you said.

And even a lot of conversations about parentification leave that out and talk about Dean as if he’s Sam’s parent — the thing is, John is still acting in some capacity as Dean and Sam’s parent in ways that are complex and undermine Dean’s agency again. The thing is, if John was totally absent, Dean possibly could have developed more of a sense of agency, because his choices and decisions would not have been questioned and undermined in the same way by an adult claiming to be an authority figure/parent while not fully carrying out that role? I’m not sure how to talk about this part without implying that children who are completely abandoned have it better. But children who are completely abandoned to take care of their siblings are in a different dynamic.

i know this might all sound like semantics but it’s really not. when i pick on the fact that we don’t know whether or not or to what level Linda Tran had a choice over becoming a parent, i think it gets at assumptions that can be very dangerous but hidden, especially about people who become pregnant and give birth – that is not always a choice.

we can talk about the differences between Linda and Dean without erasing that it’s possible that Linda had little to no choice over becoming a parent either? But the mechanism of that lack of choice (if Linda didn’t have a choice) is still different: however Linda may or may not have had choice over becoming a parent, she was certainly  **not part of a parent-child role reversal** in doing so. that’s really part of the key.

and you can talk about the differences in maturity between becoming a parent as an adult and what happened to dean without making assumptions about choice. to a certain extent there would be way more parallels between dean and a teen parent than dean and an adult parent, but even making that parallel erases parentification – the role reversal, the actual form of abuse.

it’d probably take another essay to really dig into why these roles are different and how. it’s a complex concept. And it’s not like there wouldn’t be similarities between how Linda and Dean would feel about the deaths of Kevin and Sam respectively, but this kind of direct paralleling erases the very important differences and more importantly  **_why_ ** there are differences. 

it’s also interesting to look at Linda and  _ John _ . Why  _ doesn’t _ John see parenting as “his job.”? Why does he see parenting as a job he can delegate to his elementary school aged son? How does he come to see his young child as no longer a child in order to do so?


	6. Sibling Power Dynamics

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fandom often discusses the relationship between Sam and Dean as one of child and parent. This results in interpretations of both characters and the power dynamics in their relationship which are warped beyond recognition to their canon portrayals. These distortions tend to go both backwards in time, treating the child Dean as an adult with an adult’s agency, and forwards, projecting a child’s lack of agency onto the adult Sam. As result, the adult Dean is hyper-responsibilized or viewed as a tyrant and Sam is infantilized and freed from any responsibility for his own actions. The origin of these distortions is in a lack of understanding of or a manipulative use of the concepts of parentification. Unfortunately, over time the show itself has fallen into this trap.
> 
> The following pieces explore this distortion and seek to propose a more accurate understanding of the power dynamics between siblings in a family where parentification is present.

the most important thing is **Dean did not raise Sam**. i unthinkingly used that as a shorthand in the past, not taking into account that a lot of people actually think that Dean was Sam’s primary caretaker as if John was not present as parent, and so a ton gets erased about the real family dynamic in these discussions. I fell into some traps while trying to write about some really complicated dynamics and perpetuated some ideas i really really hate in fandom, and gaaah it’s frustrating.

basically i’m saying that John’s parentification of Dean didn’t just brainwash Dean. Can we look at how John structured the family also brainwashed Sam? so it doesn’t come down to “sam does this because of how he sees the things Dean does” but it goes much further back. I mean I’ve written tons of meta on how John’s structuring the family impacted Dean and how he sees Sam and how he sees everything; I’m saying you could write just as long a meta about how John’s structuring the family impacted SAM and how he sees Dean and how he sees everything. The origins of all of this are not Dean and how he sees Sam; but in John and how he treated both brothers and how he forced them *both* – not just Dean – into rigid roles.

I’m saying that just as Dean has been “brainwashed” into a dysfunctional role and dysfunctional ways of treating Sam, Sam has equally been “brainwashed” into a dysfunctional role and dysfunctional ways of treating Dean.

And i think fandom has dissected Dean’s role down to the minutiae; it has done less of really turning the lens onto Sam.

* * *

 

the other thing that gets erased is that John actually was around, and actually was still acting as parent to both Sam and Dean no matter how we say that Dean “raised” Sam.

(and I include myself here, i have tended to fall into this shorthand as well and it’s inaccurate and damaging but it’s also a product of what i was saying before about the difficulties of terminology)

An abusive and neglectful parent, but he wasn’t completely absent. And he DEFINITELY was not without influence.

So this idea that the power dynamics between Sam and Dean are parent/child entirely erases the impact of John’s presence **_as parent_ ** _._

Parentification does not equal **complete** erasure/abdication of the role of the adult parent – that’s part of the complexity and fucked up-edness of the power dynamics involved.

there’s more to be said about this and the role of the adult parent and how that impacts the sibling relationship. but another pattern fandom does fall into when it does discuss parentification – and one I’ve also sometimes fallen into – is discussing it like fandom discusses codependency – as something that just is, or just happened somehow, not something that was _done to_ Sam and Dean by their father.

part of the problem with talking coherently about the blurred roles and boundaries with abuse and dysfunction like parentification is that we only have terminology for either of the discrete roles in question in English: we have words/concepts for Parent and Child, and we have words/concepts for Siblings (big sibling/little sibling is as close as we get).

What we don’t have is an easy way to describe when those roles have been blurred by circumstances or abuse. There is no word for the damaged and damaging hybrid that happens when one child is forced to raise another child, especially when the age difference is not all that significant – and four years is not significant in the way fandom makes it to be.

There’s a BIG difference between, say, a **teenager** made responsible for their toddler sibling compared to a **third grader** made responsible for a kindergartener. Or a four year old for an infant.

And I feel that fandom treats Sam and Dean as teenager/toddler in age difference when it does bother to acknowledge that they aren’t parent/child.

And this is ridiculous, and warps the analysis of power dynamics between Sam and Dean. And this happens alot in subtext even if people aren’t directly stating that [as adults] Dean has the power of a parent over Sam the child, because this warped thinking has seeped into fandom analysis for years, to the point where it’s accepted without thought.

So if you take away _anything_ from what I’ve been posting about today, go rewatch “Something Wicked.”

And tell me that a **nine year old** has the same level of power over a five year old as an adult parent. Or even as a teenager would.

There are ways to talk about this relationship and its power dynamics and even about the way those dynamics can be and have been harmful without skewing things so badly _._ Because when you do that, you rob Sam of the agency he does have and infantilize him, and you attribute agency to Dean that he doesn’t have, and repeat the dynamics John perpetuated.

You can talk about the way Sam sometimes behaves “as if” Dean’s his parent, and that Dean sometimes behaves “as if” Sam is his child, while not perpetuating the idea that this is the reality of the power dynamics between them – because it’s not, and _that’s the problem._

Fandom blurs the lines between these concepts without critically looking at what the reality of the power dynamics actually are. It’s far more messy and complicated than parent/child or older sibling/younger sibling, but that complexity needs to be acknowledged.

* * *

**parentification does not have the same power dynamics as parent/child**

 

> There isn’t a simple reading of the brothers’ situation, and the parent/child dynamics are just one part of this tangled web. Dean’s made decisions for Sam all season (and in earlier seasons), often assuming by forced circumstance or by choice a degree of authority that he shouldn’t hold. He’s circumvented Sam’s agency more than once, and part of that comes from his engrained desire to “take care of Sammy.” ([ x) ](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=http%3A%2F%2Fblogcritics.org%2Ftv-review-supernatural-the-purge%2F&t=ZTBjNzY5ODk0NGFjODExMGZlZTAzZDE5ZTBlMWEzNDA5OWJjOWU4OSxUWGRJd2twcw%3D%3D&b=t%3AjYFgja_o5_j4LSQgd5Jfjg&p=http%3A%2F%2Famonitrate.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F75909388831%2Fparentification-does-not-have-the-same-power&m=1)

one thing i’d like more of from the show (we might get it given 9.07) and from fandom, is recognition that this isn’t really an issue of Dean just assuming authority out of straightforward **choice** ; it’s that authority was thrust onto him from at the latest age 9 to the point where it’s ingrained behavior, something Dean doesn’t see as choice.

When you’re given that level of responsibility wayyyyyy too early in development to handle it, it becomes part of your personality – less choice, more automatic.

This is parentification.

[eta 1/31/15 there are SO MANY THINGS i would change about these posts now, it’s getting lots of reblogs again suddenly and a bunch of things bug me, #1 being Dean didn’t raise Sam, it’s way more complicated than that, and i oversimplified some things in this in order to make my points]

It’s not just that Dean learned that Sam and John’s needs were primary over his own, that Dean never quite developed full personhood because of this abuse.

**Dean ALSO had to make decisions for himself and for Sam for their survival as children.**

And continuing this pattern into adulthood is dysfunctional and has caused him to override Sam’s agency in a horrible and damaging way. We’ve been seeing the fall out from years of child abuse and neglect.

But what fandom tends to miss is that this isn’t just about codependency or about Dean not wanting to be alone: beyond the survivor’s guilt and trauma from repeatedly watching people he loves die violently, it’s been conditioned into him from elementary school age to make sure Sam survives, to take control of crisis situations, and yes to control even every day decisions, because as a child _he was given no choice about this_.

Sam was dependent on him, and Dean had no one to depend on to take care of either of them. From basic needs to Sam’s emotional needs to larger issues of survival.

He was forced to act as Sam’s parent when he himself was a child. And Sam himself, as the review points out, still sees Dean as and often reacts to Dean as if Dean is also his parent, when Dean is not.

anyway i’m finding a lot of analysis of what’s going on in fandom really lacking.

for example:

_And in assuming that role, Dean unconsciously ensures the inequality of his and Sam’s relationship._

Yes, he does; but that’s not the whole story. Also because of how they grew up, more often than not Sam _also_ contributes to the inequality in this relationship by treating Dean as his parent either to obey or to rebel against and resent. For example his lines in Fallen Idols about how he went to Ruby in s4 because he wanted to get away from Dean. Another example is his behavior in season 8.

This is NOT just about Dean, but also about Sam. In fallen idols Sam was placing responsibility for his own actions on his “need to get away” from Dean instead of taking responsibility for the fact that he was reacting as if Dean was a parent to rebel against when Dean is no such thing.

This is complicated stuff.

When fandom talks about Sam “standing up to Dean” finally, what they’re missing is that what Sam actually needs to do is realize he’s an adult and that he is making choices for himself and has to take responsibility for them _regardless_ of Dean’s behavior, because 9.01 aside, _Dean does not actually have control over Sam_.

Framing it as “standing up to Dean” is still to buy into the idea that Dean has parental power over Sam that Dean… does not have. That Sam is giving him. Because of how they were raised.

Part of Sam’s codependency is not recognizing this aspect of his own behavior: that he acts as if Dean has control over him as if they were children still. Dean can say whatever he wants: Sam is an adult, and Sam is in fact making choices when as an adult he allows what Dean says/wants/etc to hold such weight in his life. This is codependency: his need for Dean’s approval, his need to not rock the boat and do what he wants regardless (or when he does do what he wants, such as in s4, he feels he has to lie about it because he doesn’t want to face Dean’s reaction or disapproval). This is a part of what Sam was talking about in the church in 8.23, his need for Dean’s approval and how it drives his feelings and action – THIS IS ALSO CODEPENDENCY.

What fandom misses is that there is NOT a parent/child power imbalance between Sam and Dean. Fandom analyzes the power dynamics of this relationship as if it’s a parent/child one when it is very much not. This is where fandom’s grasp of parentification dynamics is totally off.

Just as Dean needs to “learn” not to treat Sam as his child, Sam actually does need to learn that Dean isn’t his parent. Instead fandom (and often Sam himself) place responsibility for Sam’s choices onto Dean. For example, the church scene in 8.23: Sam made a choice not to finish the trials; he was the only one who could make that choice.

Dean did not prevent him from doing anything – Dean did NOT override Sam’s agency there. Contrast with when Dean was attempting suicide-by-angel in 5.18, and Sam and Bobby and Cas confined him in the panic room, etc – physically preventing him from acting – that was _actually overriding his agency._ The whole point of the end of 5.18 is that Sam restored Dean’s agency to him and allowed him to make a choice about whether he was going to say YES to Michael or not.

In 8.23 Dean came to the church to inform Sam the trials would kill him – something Dean assumed Sam didn’t want given what Sam had said in 8.14 about wanting them both to survive. When Dean first arrived at the church what he was doing was trying to make sure Sam was fully informed – that Sam could actually make an informed choice about the trials. When he found out Sam was acting suicidally due to his feelings of impurity, he asked Sam to let them find a way to close hell together, the way Sam had stated he wanted to in 8.14.

This has been interpreted [in fandom] as some kind of order by a parent that takes away Sam’s ability to make a choice, as if by speaking Dean took away Sam’s agency. Sam himself (and possibly the show) seem to see it that way.

That’s bullshit.

If, like Dean in 5.18, Sam couldn’t go through with killing himself to save the world in front of his brother, that is still Sam’s responsibility for making a choice. If he made that decision because he feels like Dean can’t cope with him dying and felt pressured, _that is still Sam’s choice._

Look, the issues of codependency and trauma and childhood abuse on this show tend to boil down to Sam and Dean not feeling like they have agency where they do actually have it. Because as children they DIDN’T have agency and this formed them.

For Dean, he doesn’t feel like he has the agency NOT to save Sam, for a variety of reasons including the fact that he was explicitly emotionally punished by John for a time John blamed Dean for Sam’s life being at risk (Something Wicked) – when John was the one who’d left his children alone in a town where a monster who preyed on children was active. Including also John putting the save/kill Sam promise onto Dean in IMToD after Dean had just awakened from coma that followed being tortured by a demon wearing his father’s face – in a word, severe trauma.

Dean’s fear of being alone is only a part of what’s going on, it’s the surface part that is easiest for Sam [and the audience] to grasp, because it’s the only part Dean’s ever really articulated to him because that’s the part about himself Dean understands. But Dean **was** making choices there, he made a choice in 9.01 and he recognized it as a choice at the time even if it doesn’t feel like a choice. This is what Sam was referring to by his line about how the problem isn’t that Dean is poison. Dean seeing himself as poison means Dean seeing this stuff as inherently in him, his inherent monstrosity, instead of choices he’s making that don’t feel like choices because of how he was abused as a child and the trauma he’s suffered since then.

But at the same time, Sam is **also** **making choices**. Choices he doesn’t see as choices, because he is acting as if he is Dean’s child. Sam seems to see himself as having no agency or control over situations where _he does in fact have control_ such as the church scene. That was Sam’s choice, regardless of what Dean wanted. Part of being an adult and separating yourself from your family is recognizing that you do have choices even when you feel like you don’t. That can be really tough when you grew up with abusive parents and family dysfunction. And it can take a lot to go against what your family wants: Sam’s done it before, when he went to Stanford despite what his father and brother wanted.

At one point I talked about destiny versus free will as interpreted through the lens of family dysfunction, and this is what i mean: destiny is that feeling of lacking choices because of what formed you. free will is recognizing that despite what formed you, _you do have choices_ over how you act given your circumstances.

Sam might often perceive Dean as his parent the way Dean often perceives Sam as his child – but that’s not the truth of their relationship, and they have been able to function as equals within the relationship fairly often over the course of the series.

One thing the repeated use of WWWS (what’s wrong with Sam) has done is degrade this truth both within the minds of the audience and within the relationship between the brothers. WWWS repeatedly over the past 4 seasons has re-established this false parent/child dynamic that is a product of John Winchester’s abusive parenting. You could argue that this is probably true to how it would work out in real life given siblings with this background and the events since s5; but it has also been a choice the show has made: the show dug into and reinforced this dysfunction that Sam and Dean had tried to walk away from in season 5.

I go back and forth about whether this has been productive storytelling for the show. It’s certainly limited their other choices about what they explore with both characters, often to the detriment of both. These are characters that have other traumas that could be explored but haven’t, in favor of this one issue. It’s a core issue, sure; it’s an issue I don’t feel had been completely resolved by season 5, but… the show intentionally backtracked and regressed both characters past even where they were in the first 5 seasons.

I think I’d be more content with this regression if the text at all identified it as being BECAUSE of the events that have happened since season 5: if Dean’s regression from where he stood in s5 was explored as being a result of watching Sam go to the cage, of his own hell trauma contributing to trauma about knowing Sam was suffering in hell. If the show had gone from there and incorporated Dean being forced back into a caretaker role when Sam returned soulless and then had the wall in season 6, as influenced by losing Lisa and Ben, the role played by the wall’s breaking in season 7, and then the trials in season 8, and then…

you get the picture? Instead the writing of the show in the past two seasons seems to be happening in a vacuum, where Dean’s reactions have no roots in watching Sam go to hell because Dean’s own hell trauma has never been dealt with on the show and is barely acknowledged. The point that WWWS repeating over 4 seasons meaning cumulative caretaker issues for Dean himself, not to mention Sam’s feelings of impurity and his feelings of loss of agency, are not acknowledged by the text.

Instead everything has been reduced to “codependency.” As if it’s just self-evident and that simplistic.

This was what I was trying to get at in my “[against codependency](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14401089/chapters/33256932)” post. What’s playing out right now could be so much richer, but it’s not.

Fandom’s analysis of it doesn’t have to throw away the complexities of it, though. Fandom’s analysis can recognize when Sam actually does have agency and the difference between that and when Dean has in fact taken Sam’s agency away. Fandom analysis can get into the complexities of cPTSD for both characters and how their childhood shaped both of them and their relationship, without falling into the trap of analyzing this as if they actually ARE parent/child with the related power dynamics, instead of two abused children whose dysfunction was formed by circumstances outside of either of their control.

anyway. um…. this got rambly. and long.

[ IMPORTANT CLARIFICATION ](http://amonitrate.tumblr.com/post/75912520351/andieblogs-replied-to-your-post-parentification)

I’m trying to articulate some things that are very complex, and honestly it’s not as simple as siblings seeing each other as parent and child at all. it’s somewhere in between, and that’s where the problems come in.

[ on how insisting on parent/child power dynamics erases and perpetuates abuse ](http://amonitrate.tumblr.com/post/75937238223/an-important-point)

[ more on power dynamics ](http://amonitrate.tumblr.com/post/75949242862/part-of-the-problem-with-talking-coherently-about)

[ on dean’s actions during crisis as re-enactment of trauma ](http://amonitrate.tumblr.com/post/75924528013/i-came-across-a-post-some-days-ago-a-bit-about-the)

[ more on sam as counterdependent/codependent ](http://amonitrate.tumblr.com/post/75920347537/i-think-a-better-word-for-sam-is-counter-dependent)

* * *

 

**an important point**

when fandom analyzes Sam and Dean’s relationship via the power dynamics of parent/child and sees Dean as having the power of a parent in that relationship

THIS ERASES HOW DEAN HIMSELF WAS ABUSED.

BECAUSE DEAN WAS ALSO A CHILD.

THIS WAS A CHILD/CHILD RELATIONSHIP.

DEAN IS NOT.

SAM’S.

PARENT.

AND DOES NOT HAVE AND **NEVER** HAD THE POWER OF A PARENT OVER A CHILD.

this also erases how Sam was abused by John, because being left to be raised by another child _is abuse._

what fandom does when it insists on using a parent/child power dynamic lens to analyze sam and dean’s relationship is inadvertently _repeat the dynamics parentification_.

next time you’re analyzing sam and dean’s relationship with the power dynamics of parent/child, think of the fact that in Something Wicked the “parent” figure is IN THIRD GRADE.

I’d argue that sometimes Dean “caves” to what Sam wants, and sometimes Dean does what Dean wants without getting Sam’s input or respecting it when Sam gives it. BUT I also see it the other way around, just as often: Sam does often “cave” to what Dean wants, and just as often does what Sam wants without Dean’s input or respecting Dean’s input. As recently as season 8 with Benny, but this is an ongoing pattern between them.

Fandom tends to simplify it as only one or only the other depending on what’s going on currently on the show in a given week/season, but that’s just not the case. If you break down any given season you’ll see this push-pull dynamic play out between the two of them in both directions. Some seasons are more about Sam disregarding what Dean wants/needs and some seasons are more about Dean disregarding what Sam wants/needs. Both brothers have massive control issues and they tend to play out in different ways.

Due to their inadequate parenting, NEITHER brother developed healthy capacities to understand what is and what is not their responsibilities and how to take responsibility for their choices. Or that they are even making choices, especially when it comes to their relationship. Given that Sam hit bottom several years ago and had a chance to learn from it, Sam has progressed a bit farther in how to take responsibility for some of his choices – namely the large things [n.b. i strongly disagree with this now]. What he hasn’t dealt with is how he is in fact making choices when it comes to his own life, what he does with it, and in his relationship with Dean. Which are all tied together given the imperative to hunt.

For a lot of reasons which would take another post to break down, but to simplify as _constant crisis_ for years (especially of the WWWS variety) Dean hasn’t had the chance to really understand and take responsibility for the things that ARE his responsibility – he tends to, typical of a parentified child, either take responsibility on himself for things that AREN’T his responsibility, OR on the other hand not see the things that are his responsibility as things he has choice over.

If Sam has externalized some of his issues as a matter of purity/impurity, Dean has internalized some of HIS issues as a matter of monstrosity/poison.

Both characters are going to have to deal with those things.

This might sound like semantics, and I did say that Dean sees Sam as his child in my post, and I should probably have been more exact. It’s hard to talk about this! But it’s not really seeing a sibling as your child, and they don’t really see you as their parent, because there is still the authority of the actual parent present.

So the parentified child never has full authority the way they would if they were an actual parent and an adult. In fact the real parent often undermines the perceived “authority” of the parentified child. Often the siblings see this and react against it in complex ways, not quite seeing the older child as parent not quite seeing them as sibling – man this is hard to articulate fully. But the older sibling doesn’t see the younger sibling as child or as full sibling either.

Parentification is being stuck half way. not one or the other. There isn’t the authority of being a parent, there isn’t the regular dynamics of being a sibling.

I’ve probably contributed to confusion in fandom about this when I simplify it to saying Sam sees Dean as parent and Dean sees Sam as child. The problem is that this isn’t true. It’s a weird parent/sibling hybrid instead.

fandom throws around the word like it throws around PTSD and codependency, half the time without really getting what it’s talking about and how it’s playing out deeply on the show but never gets beyond the surface and the dictionary definition of these concepts.

mostly via insisting (or subtextually arguing as if) that the power dynamics between sam and dean are parent/child. you can’t say the power dynamics are parent/child and then mention parentification in the same breath — all that tells me is that you don’t get it at all.

part of the results of parentification is that the other sibling(s) carry a lot of confused feelings and resentment toward the parentified kid as well. And i think we are seeing that play out with sam, and have all series, just as we’ve seen it play out with Dean. which is not to say that this is ALL of what Sam’s said to Dean recently, because it’s not. but it’s definitely a big part of fandom’s view of things.

as with “codependency” this isn’t something that is just dean’s issue. I get that due to current events [in season 9] the focus is on how Dean’s behavior is damaging, and I’m not trying to take away from the truth that Dean’s behavior _is damaging._

But Sam and Dean were both formed by John’s abuse, it just manifests in different ways. and the power dynamics of abused siblings especially when there’s parentification involved is far more complex than fandom seems capable of dealing with from what I’ve seen, to be quite honest.

* * *

 i have a couple more unexpected minutes to kill before taking the cat to the vet so it occurs to me i’d love to see [ sargraf’s meta about dean-as-caretaker ](http://sargraf.tumblr.com/post/22570739112/about-dean-caregiving-and-perception) and the stuff we’re talking about today and have been talking about re: parentification combined… because of the What’s Wrong With Sam aspects of the past 4 seasons are both separate and overlapping with the parentification aspects. They’re not quite the same but they’re related and probably the parentification is going to contribute to and amplify the caretaking aspects we saw going on in s6-9, and that more recent caretaking role is a big contributor to 9.01 and Dean’s decision making there as much as the history of parentification did?

Basically I think you could write a book about 8.23-9.01 and what contributed to why Dean did what he did, and it’s way beyond codependency.

There’s codependency and trauma/PTSD, there’s the history of child abuse, neglect and parentification, and there’s the caretaking role that’s related to WWWS from the previous several years, and all of these things overlap, combine, and amplify each other.

this is what was at the heart of my “[against codependency](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14401089/chapters/33256932)” rant awhile ago. There are too many layers to what’s going on to flatten them into one box.

another point because they’re occurring to me randomly is that John’s presence as authority figure undermines Dean’s authority (as caretaker/pseudo-parent) over Sam. And yet even into adulthood we see Dean held responsible for Sam’s choices/actions.

we possibly see this when Sam runs away? tho this is mostly speculation, as we don’t see a lot of situations when Sam and Dean were children other than the Striga episode when Sam was still pretty young.

but part of parentification is not having the full authority of a parent, because of being a child and a sibling. Especially in situations where the age difference isn’t really that great – and 4 years isn’t huge.

We probably don’t have enough in canon to really talk about this, but we could look at their adult relationship and extrapolate some things from the way Sam both chafes under and sometimes follows/seems to need Dean’s authority or leadership as older brother?

What we haven’t done is talk much about the impact of the parentification on Sam. That aspect is harder for me to articulate. But I have some idea of the theoreticals.


	7. Excerpt from "You're Gonna Have to Let Me Grow Up"

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> To close here’s an excerpt on parentification from _[You’re gonna have to let me grow up: the campaign to rescue Sam’s image in five easy steps](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8239544/chapters/18882515)_ which sums up my thinking on how parentification impacts Sam and Dean’s relationship as adults, at least as of season 5.

One aspect of the relationship between a parentified child and the other siblings in the family is that the siblings resent the child left in charge because that child attempts, out of necessity, to replicate a parent’s limit setting and correction of their behavior. 

It’s a double bind for the parentified child, to be resented by their siblings for something they have no choice in and yet live in fear of being reprimanded by the parent over the behavior of the other children. This adoption of the parental roles of disciplinarian and control over the siblings is exactly what’s expected by the abusive parent. We see this in John’s behavior towards Dean, even as adults, when John chastises Dean for failing to tell him about Sam’s visions in season 1. We see hints of this in the way Dean talks about “when Dad got home” after Sam ran away to Flagstaff.

This is the whole reason parentification is utilized in the first place: to fill in for the missing or neglectful parent, and that must by definition include discipline and limit setting, must include control of the other children. Dean is expected not just to protect Sam, but to keep him in line. To do that, Dean must not only rigidly adhere to John’s demands himself, but ensure Sam does as well.  In Dean’s case it’s clear he was blamed and possibly punished for any behavior of Sam’s that John disliked. In addition to whatever happened “when Dad got home” after Sam ran away, we’re shown John lashing out at Dean when he’s frustrated with Sam in season 1. And it’s clear that dynamic was invisible to Sam himself.

A necessity of even the best parenting could be framed as telling a minor child what to do for their own good, though when skillful it’s more about guidance and teaching. What parentification does is create a situation where a child is filling this role with another child. Even if done with utmost skill, it’s bound to cause issues. This dynamic is resented by the siblings. They accurately see the parentified child as lacking the authority of an adult, let alone an adult parent, and often act out in response, testing boundaries, testing the parentified child’s ability to “parent.”

The siblings also resent what they see as the elevation of the parentified child to a position “above” them in the family hierarchy, so that all the siblings are no longer equal. They believe this means the parent prefers the parentified child over them, or that the parentified child is being given special privileges, when what’s happening is abusive and usually damaging to the parentified child.

The parentified child is by definition not mature enough to have the skills or judgement of a good parent and the very presence of parentification itself usually means they don’t have great role models for what good parenting is supposed to look like in the first place. This often results in the parentified child reacting poorly or unskillfully in response to that testing and resentment by their siblings. The parentified child might attempt to imitate the behavior of their parent without the ability to back it up with adult authority, often without understanding that what they’re replicating might be dysfunctional at best. They can attempt to be over-controlling in handling the other children because of the fear of punishment from the parent. I think we also see traces of this at play in “Fallen Idols” from Dean’s side. Even if the parentified child did everything “right” by the standards of good-enough parenting, their siblings might still resent them because of the perceived imbalance in equality. Because they are not, in fact, parents.

It’s a vicious cycle that can be summed up as “you’re not my dad!” and “do what i say because I say so!” Dean doesn’t even have the option of resorting to “I’m telling Dad when he gets home!” as John is absent for extended periods, leaving him without potential recourse to a higher authority, and clearly expects Dean to just handle things without any support. And yet when John dislikes how Dean handles things on his own, he punishes Dean -- as we saw in “Something Wicked” and “Bad Boys.” This undermines what little authority the parentified child might have with their siblings in the first place. Again, think of the way John repeatedly undercuts Dean in front of Sam, putting him in his place even as an adult in season 1, and look at Sam’s reaction to that -- he tends to view it all as a joke. I doubt that’s a new pattern.

Typically the parentified child is seen by siblings as complicit with the parent. Because the parentified child, especially in cases that involve emotional parentification, have been made privy to the concerns of the parent in ways the other siblings have not, they tend to internalize the POV of the parent before they have a chance to develop their own perspectives. The siblings often see the parentified child as allying with the parent in a way that doesn’t accurately reflect the parentified child’s actual experience.

What the siblings (and usually the parentified child) aren’t aware of is that the parentified child was never given a choice over this dynamic. The dynamic ruptures the possibility for true alliance between the siblings with one another against the parent. The parentified child is as isolated as the non-parentified siblings, but in a different way. Often anger from the other children that should be targeted at the parent as the responsible party is instead directed at the parentified child as the parent-surrogate, because the parent isn’t available and the parentified child serves as the “face” of an authority they don’t actually possess, for dynamics they don’t fully understand or have any control over. Look at the way Sam views Dean in season 1 as “daddy’s little soldier.” Look at how Sam reacts when Dean finally tells him what John said about Sam before he died, what John made Dean promise, in season 2. 

Much of the anger and contempt Sam occasionally shows Dean is intimately linked with John’s parentification of Dean, and with how John treated Dean in front of Sam. Probably from an early age, Sam was well aware that though Dean tried to act like his father, he couldn’t match up, which John made a point of emphasizing by reasserting his power and authority by disparaging Dean and putting him in his place. We see this in operation in season 1 as well, when John chastises Dean for his “new tone” when Dean stands up to him.

Judging by “A Very Supernatural Christmas” in season 3, we know from canon that Sam was kept unaware of the supernatural until he was at least age 8 or 9. As seen in “Something Wicked,” John was leaving Dean in charge of Sam from a young age with instructions to shoot first and ask questions later, against threats that only Dean knows are real. We know that at least once John ordered Dean to stay in the motel room for a period of days, and presumably to keep young Sam confined there too. Chances are that wasn’t unusual given the not exactly kid friendly right-off-the-highway location of most motels. 

So in addition to everyday childcare duties, Dean is expected to defend Sam’s life with violence and keep Sam confined and under control, all for reasons he’s not allowed to share with Sam. Dean most likely constantly worried that their father might not return from a job that Sam has no idea has a high rate of fatality. Any anxiety over John’s absence will look overblown to Sam, who doesn’t know the true nature of his father’s job. Given that parentification tends to be invisible to the siblings, how does all of this look to Sam? Wouldn’t it seem like Dean is a totally batshit crazy hypervigilant control freak of a brother?

This is one of the keys to Sam’s hair-trigger resentment of Dean’s (perceived and real) “bossiness” as adults. Dean’s attempts to reign in Sam’s reckless and destructive behavior during season 4 remind Sam of everything he chafed against when they were children, regardless of the vast differences in the two circumstances. Sam is conditioned to minimize any threat Dean sees as Dean overreacting and any disapproval of Sam’s actions as an attempt at dictating Sam’s life, of wielding an illegitimate authority over him. As pushing him around.

In “Fallen Idols,” Dean’s need to rebuild trust with Sam manifests through exerting some sense of control over their partnership via being “bossy” -- replicating aspects of a dynamic that most likely existed at times between them as children, when as the child John left “in charge” of another child under threat of punishment, Dean was expected to dictate to Sam what he could and could not do. Sam responds to that trigger without putting Dean’s present day behavior into the context of current events or how Sam has treated him -- that Dean’s mistrust is a logical consequence of Sam’s actions [in the aftermath of season 4].

When they were children, most likely Dean attempted to control Sam via preventing him from doing completely mundane things normal to childhood because they didn’t fit in with John’s expectations; as adults, Sam views Dean’s reactions through that lens, no matter how destructive or harmful his own behavior is. Because of their childhood dynamic, Sam views his relationship with Dean as one sided: Dean’s actions negatively impact Sam. Given his reaction in 5.16, Sam was completely oblivious to the fact that his actions as a child could be detrimental to Dean.

As an adult, Sam still does not view the relationship as an equal one where his own actions negatively impact Dean. What’s interesting is that the show often sees the relationship through that same lens, which influences the fandom to see it that way too.


End file.
